Your "$300" per kilowatt hour battery pack estimate is out of date already. As Asit Biswas and Cecilia Tortajada write in a Conversation column syndicated here today link to juancole.com,

"The cost per kilowatt-hour for a battery used in a standard electric vehicle has come down from $1000 in 2010 to $130-150 now. The distance you can travel with a single charge is steadily increasing: some electric cars can be driven for more than 1000km before the battery needs to be charged. . .

As battery technology improves, costs are coming down. It’s predicted that the total cost of owning an electric vehicle – including charging and maintenance – will fall below conventional car ownership in Europe in 2018. And Nissan estimates that electric vehicles and conventional cars will cost roughly the same by 2025."

Future technology always seems more difficult than it is, because breakthroughs haven't yet been made. Engineers used to write me similar messages in 2005 that renewables would never be able to compete with the concentrated energy in fossil fuels and that solar was 7 times more expensive than hydrocarbons. And last fall in Chile a concentrated solar bid was let for less than 3 cents a kilowatt hour; coal is 5 cents a kilowatt hour. It has only been 12 years. What we do know is that the more R&D money is thrown at these issues and the bigger the consumer market, the faster technology changes, and now that China is in big time along with states like California, things will change faster than we can imagine.

Very few states in modern times have balkanized in the long run, and keeping opposition cantons going when they are losing is very difficult to do or to justify. People also kept predicting that Iraq would permanently lose Mosul or Kirkuk, and Baghdad already has them both back. Damascus will be weaker than before, but it will likely over time reassert itself.

I'd prefer that the US not be in Syria. However, Raqqa under ISIL attacked NATO members on several occasions, and self-defense is allowed by the UN Charter. That the US effort to roll up ISIL is illegal in international law is not at all apparent and I very much doubt that a legal challenge to it in any international tribunal would succeed.

I think most Syrian weapons are from Russia, which is among the Big Five for arms sales. Why it always gets a pass from the Left, even though it is now a far right ultra-nationalist hyper-capitalist crony state is completely beyond me.

Concerns about war tactics that target civilians or recklessly disregard their welfare are not PR campaigns. After the opposition has been crushed and the Baath secret police safely reinstalled, of course there is social peace, and the death of politics. Al-Assad has in fact gone on arresting dissidents and had 10,000 tortured to death in jail and then had pictures taken of their corpses.

Hi, Alec. Yes, the US army in South Vietnam thought exactly as you do. It was invited in by the government and many believed that it was necessary to destroy the village to save it, sir!

Many Syrian rebels are just ordinary Sunnis and specifically to target their schoolchildren and the hospitals where they are treated and to cut the civilian population off from food, which have been the al-Assad regime's tactics and those of its Russian backer, are serial war crimes, which amount to crimes against humanity.

Some of us care about human rights more than we do about political consistency. It is all right to be on the same side as Russia if Russia's case is just. It is all right to be on the same side as the (increasingly tattered) US State Department if their case is just. It is the facts that matter and those facts can be known.

A regime is a government. Regimes are typically tightly organized, like the Baath Party in Syria or the Communist Party in North Korea. Saudi Arabia has not at least until recently had a regime. Your hang up on the term is imposing on it meanings it does not have. It is true that regimes are less legitimate than elected governments.

Chinese R & D in solar is among their few innovative sectors, and you are being unfair to them in that regard. It isn't important whether PV is slightly more expensive than wind but that both are far less expensive than fossil fuels if you take into account externalities (and increasingly even if you don't). Not sure why you think Chinese engineers can't build wind turbines. The technological challenges are far less than with PV.

You didn't live through the catastrophe that befell people's mortgage equity in the Detroit area, I see. As for staffing the Self Defense Forces in Japan, given N. Korea's threats I think that is important.

The ban was already law. It affects primary schools across the board. Khamenei is in control of enforcement. This was just tightening the screws. But, by the way, Khamenei as leader can issue directives that have the force of law.

Calling support for Syrian rebels 'terrorism' is just propaganda, and would implicate France and the US as well. Anyway that isn't what people mean in the West when they charge Saudi Arabia with terrorism. They think the royal family is al-Qaeda, which is ridiculous.

The problem is your use of "tons." Lebanon has 4 million citizens and 25,000 Hizbullah fighters. That would be equivalent to a massive army of 2 million US fighters under arms with training, medium and heavy weaponry, and line of command, twice as large as the US military. Doesn't exist.

“ The Sherman tanks and self-propelled guns that U.S. Army chief of staff General George C. Marshall had promised to British prime minister Winston Churchill were finally arriving, giving Allied tankers something like parity against German panzers. Overhead, 100 American-made fighters and medium bombers had joined the assault on Axis troops, airfields, and communication lines.“

The comment of someone who does not understand genetic history. Prince Harry has 1 million ancestors in the time of Edward IV. None of them related to Edward IV? Let’s try this: James Stuart was his descendant, which is why he succeeded Edward IV’s great granddaughter Elizabeth I. And Princess Diana was descended from the Stuarts

There was no Hizbullah proper before '84 or so, but several smaller radical groups, especially Islamic Amal of Abbas Mousawi. The radicals were mainly cultivated by Iraqi Da'wa, though Iran played a growing role over time. See Richard Norton's work.

Iraqi Da'wa was probably as or more important in formation of Hizbullah as Iran. It was the Israeli occupation from 1982 that radicalized Lebanese Shiites, and Hizbullah was more effective in defending the South.

The problem with your original comment is that it does not address proportions. Almost all Lebanese say Hizbullah should keep its arms for now. Some say that they should keep them forever. 56% of Shiites say this. A majority of Catholics say this. Even 12% of Maronites say this. But only 7% of Sunnis say this. So sure, you can say there are Sunnis who support Hizbullah strongly. But 93% of them don't support them to the hilt, and moreover, the percentage of Sunnis who do is the absolute smallest among all the confessions. So it is possible, you see, to make some judgments.

There are 20,000 Safaitic Aramaic and Arabic inscriptions by the ancient Arabs, and few have been studied.

The revisionist historians are not dismissive of all ancient texts. They trust those that can be securely dated. So they would trust the Greek chronicle of Theophylact Simocatta, finished 630 in Constantinople. But the stories about Muhammad in 630 come from Ibn Ishaq and later authors, from 760 forward and they don't trust something 130 to 300 years after the fact.

This is why I apologized for putting up something abstruse. Some scholars reject the later Abbasid sources about early Islam and want proof of virtually everything they assert, which isn't of course forthcoming. To my knowledge there are now only two Arabic inscriptions using al-Ilah or Allah, both Christian and both 6th century. There are many Aramaic/ Nabatean such inscriptions but they trail off two hundred years before the prophet's birth.

They ran away and left behind billions in US military equipment for ISIL. One of the greatest military fiascoes in history. In part, the Mosul citizenry massed and attacked them. In part, the enlisted men from Hilla knew their officers had screwed them by taking money for ghost deployments and leaving half the force in Hilla and Basra. They were damned if they were going to die for that.

Tillerson and the State Department are plenty smart. Tillerson is *ignorant* in ways that shock me given his broad experience of the world. As for State, I'm sure they're mortified and demoralized. Hang in there, folks!

This discussion is by now sufficiently off topic that I'm closing it. However, you lost that one and your explanation of why does not hold water. That you're still fighting for the long-disappeared 'South Vietnam' explains why you're so into our current lost causes.

It is not ignorance. The Koch brothers suborned the democratically elected representatives on the GOP side in Florida to make sure they can keep farting out billions of tons of heat trapping gases and get paid to do it.

The Taliban are deeply unpopular with most non-Pushtuns. A lot of Pushtuns, 44% of the population, have a sneaking admiration for them and under some situations prefer them to corrupt officials from Tajik Kabul. Kabul has little authority in Qandahar, Helmand, etc. and almost no troop in the ANA are from there.

The rich are too small a group to win elections so they seek other constituencies-- anti-federal government rural folk and Evangelical Christians who see abortion as a form of genocide. Rich women can fly elsewhere for their abortions, so kowtowing to the Evangelicals on this issue costs the rich almost nothing.

The Taliban now hold more territory in Afghanistan than at any time since 2001. In places like Kunduz the Afghanistan National Army has proved unable or unwilling to stand against Taliban offenses without US handholding. Social statistics don't matter, national will matters.

No, it is the appropriation of the term Salafi by people not originally connected to the liberal movement. I am not aware that al-Banna called himself a Salafi. Muslim Brothers were distinct from Salafis until the 1990s when some proportion of the movement so designated themselves, and then split off.

The word Salafi has two meanings. 1) is late 19th and early 20th century liberal Sunni reformers-- Jamal al-Din al-Afghani, Muhammad Abduh and (a little more conservative) Rashid Rida. Abduh allowed bank interest and sharing meals with Christians and was against veiling.

2) is late twentieth century Sunni fundamentalists who adopt Saudi Wahhabi practices into their Sunnism in places like Egypt. The two kinds of "Salafi" could not be more different.

An essential tenet of Sunnism is that you have to belong to one of the 4 madhhabs or legal rites. Ibn `Abd al-Wahhab rejected that. Another is that you have to accept other Sunnis as Muslims if they say they are, even if they lead a dissolute lifestyle. Ibn `Abd al-Wahhab rejected this. Not Sunni.

I don't deny that Wahhabis have become accepted by many as a kind of Sunni in the past 40 years or so, but that has to do with the influence of oil money. But this is a relatively new wrinkle in history. Rashid Rida, no liberal, did not see them as Sunnis in the 1920s.

Yes, I am saying that the assertion that they are actually Hanbalis and a form of Sunni is recent, and is political. They have not always considered themselves Sunnis. Read ibn Abd al-Wahhab. In the Gulf you hear people talking about Wahhabis vs. Sunnis.